Take What You Have Learned to Where It Matters
First published on September 29, 2021
It is quite a thing, sometimes, to return somewhere. To a place, a time, a song, a smell that, as Frank Turner wrote in The Way I Tend To Be, takes you somewhere you just can’t quite place.
Or, sometimes, you can place it.
Tomorrow, depending on the weather, I may be on the train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo going to work. Work in a room, with all the post-covid excitement and nerves that many people are by now familiar with. I might also bike, if the weather is as beautiful as it is this morning, but even thinking about that train journey, it’s impossible not to think about this writing practice. The Train Series, which became my 12-minute blog, some of which over the next year or so will become a series of books called The 12-Minute Method. That train journey, which took me to various jobs through a period of personal and professional transformation. A transformation brought into starkest view, perhaps, by this writing practice. It began as an act of courage, and became a vehicle like almost no other that I have experienced for changing how I think, feel, write, act. How I am.
And, tomorrow, regardless of the weather, I’ll be sitting in a training room, guiding a group of people through the first day of a 9-month coaching training programme. So not only am I going back to the start of the 12-minute method, but also to the start of the magical journey that I have been on with this craft, this art, this profession that we call coaching.
That is quite something, too.
These moments of being taken back to the start, being taken to an old feeling, being reminded of the passing of time and the transformation – or lack of it – of people, places and things... these moments matter. They are moments to mark, because of everything they bring. And they are moments to remember just what we have been through, just what we used to be like, just how much we have done.
The return is part of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, The Hero’s Journey. At the end, for the story to be one that truly captures the imagination of people, that carries down the generations, the hero, after their adventure, after battling the beast, must return home. Lyra must go back to her own world; Peter Parker gets back into his bed in Aunt May’s house; Frodo and Bilbo, a generation apart, both return to the Shire. But they return changed.
No longer the bolshy little girl playing with the gyptians in the mud, now the girl who saved the world. Not just the world. The worlds.
No longer the shy boy or the selfish performer who let the robber get away, now the hero who tracked him down.
No longer the hobbits, happy with their small corner of the world, with their gardens, bickering with the Tooks and the Sackville-Baggins, now the adventurers who carried the ring when no one else could and changed the course of Middle Earth.
They return, to their communities, with wisdom. Because without that step, all the change, growth and transformation we might go through is really – as Robert Holden might put it – spiritual entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact it's a lot of fun, but if we don’t return with the wisdom we have learned to the real world, to use that wisdom and growth in the places that matter to us, where we make our home and where our loved ones live, then what was it really all for? It might be a beautiful adventure, there might be wonderful sights to see, but if we don’t come back, notice what has changed and bring that changed self into the community, then what was it really all for?
That, in some ways, is why it is important that we sometimes go back to the start.